Calais Module for Drupal Released

Posted on: April 20, 2008

One of the hottest
subjects in Web technologies, these days, is finding effective ways to
exploit Collective
Intelligence of
masses. Most everybody has heard of the so-called Web 2.0 and hundreds
of different definitions of what it is or is not. In simple terms, Web
2.0 is a phenomena characterized by vastly increased direct
participation of the user community in content authoring, mostly through
blogs and discussions around blogs. Web 2.0 has brought us to a state
where more and better content is freely available online than ever
before.

There is a major problem with collective intelligence, though:
information pieces are often disbursed. The more we move from the early
days of the Internet as static data publishing platform towards the
Internet, an aggregator of Intelligence, more do modern search engines
fall short of providing adequate results. Current technologies are often
unable to put information in context and help us connect the dots. It is
for that reason that there is an increased demand for tools that can
extract context off of content and can aggregate different data sources
in a meaningful way.

One of such tools that has caught some spotlight lately, has been
Calais Web Service, released by the news
giant: Reuters.

"The Calais web service allows you to automatically annotate your
content with rich semantic metadata, including Entities like People
and Companies and Events & Facts like Acquisitions and Management
Changes." -- opencalais.com

What is exceptional and interesting about the Calais web-service,
putting it beyond and above other free terms-extractor services (like
the one from
Yahoo!)
is that Calais provides context to extracted terms. For instance, when
Calais web service analyzes a piece of content and finds "George Bush",
not only will it extract and return it as a term (keyword) relevant to
the text, but it will also tell you that George Bush is a Person.
Likewise, it will tell you that United States is a country. This may
seem trivial and simple, but if you put the added information (entity
type) to a good use, you can build systems much more intelligent than
you could with other, flat terms extraction tools.

Calais is a free Web Service. You can plug it into your applications
and/or content management systems and use it, without any charge .
Frank and I, spent a lot of our
time last month integrating it into Drupal CMS and
are glad to announce that it is now available for both Drupal 5 and
Drupal 6. It is also the first integration of Calais API with a major
content-management system.

You can download Calais integration module from:\
http://drupal.org/project/opencalais\
You can also watch a short screencast Frank recorded to demo main
features of the module:
http://calais.phase2technology.com/content/calais-demo-screencast

The screencast was recorded before the code was finalized, so the module
can actually do more than you see in the screencast. You are encouraged
to download and test-drive it.

And last, but not least, we would like to express our gratitude to our
friends at the Calais team, for their invaluable help and support.

Irakli Nadareishvili's Blog

"The only things you need to be a great programmer are: curiosity, empathy and attention to detail. Everything else you can learn over time. Everything." ~ @inadarei